DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
73% Positive
Analyzed from 5893 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#ukraine#world#russia#poland#war#more#don#polish#russian#things
Discussion (117 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The war in Ukraine is a tragedy, but it has proved that Russia is weak. The price shock will speed up the transition to renewables, and Iran is losing its grip on Hormuz. So many of the other issues are solvable.
It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
That is just hope-believe, i.e. it ain't happening.
> It's easy to be a pessimist, but there's a bright future ahead of us.
I lived through the 1990s here in Romania, the future does not look bright in the slightest. Yes, materially speaking we do have more stuff compared to the 1990s, a lot more stuff, but the opportunities in front of us are as slim as ever (which wasn't the case back in the 1990s). But maybe things look different for the Polish.
Bro, try to open other media then tvn, onet or wyborcza. I dare you, because it feels like are living in a honey sweet liberal "eu is the way" bubble.
I don't care what scandalous thing a politician said on any given day. I do not want to be advertising or voting material, to be riled up and pitted against others.
That means that I can judge the state of things by simply living in the country and watching what happens around me, comparing it to other places I visit. And that paints a very positive picture of the reality that surrounds us. Even on a practical level, living in a city that is safe and clean with good public transportation is something I've learned to appreciate. There are very few places in the world where I would consider living at this point, and in summertime at least, when the weather is nice, I simply wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
As to the OP and the blog post (impressive, btw!) — I largely agree. I don't think this is fear-mongering, these things are genuinely happening and are real risks. The OP didn't panic, and neither do I — but I do take these risks into account.
For instance: it's mentioned that EU gas storage is at 67% and Germany's at 56%.
What is not mentioned though is that Poland's storage is at 97% because the previous administration, for better or worse, was paranoid enough to invest in a sizeable marine gas terminal and the current one stocked up early.
Regarding real estate: adjusted for inflation prices peaked 2.5 years ago, interest rates are also much lower than back then. Nobody is buying because all the Ukrainian refugees who were moving to Poland are here already and that's the last bump in population this country will see for the foreseeable future.
Also there's the threat of war on Polish soil, which affects investor sentiment.
https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/gas/eu-gasspeicher
For instance, Italy has more storage capacity per capita despite very similar consumption (~10TWh/1mln population) and they're already at 86%+.
Meanwhile indeed Poland has much less storage (about a third of Germany per capita), but it also uses it less (half the consumption of Germany per capita).
I must ask: what the hell are the Germans waiting for?
Bureaucracy, most likely. That and in-fighting (I count NIMBY as an example of that, but not the only thing).
Here's a train station in Berlin, whose upgrade is currently 20 years behind schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station
I don't know if Putin is crazy enough to chance it, but I wouldn't put it past him to do so.
But even then, Russia would need to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops and that is not something you can pull off in a week, or even a month.
Just because the numbers might be small if germany doesn't has enough gas and some old fragile human being might die of this or because they cant afford the gas, its still no way to die in a country like germany.
What does your comment add to this discussion?
We should stop caring? You decide how others can live because you are well off?
Unless you mean nazi invasions ofc in which case you’re just a troll.
Many generations are. Last century saw the collapse of the British and Soviet empires - titans by any measure - through mismanagement. Europe as an international power was also broken (compared to how they used to be). I can easily imagine 1900s me fleeing to America in fear of the end times and feeling quite justified in his choices with hindsight. Less obvious where to run to these days as the US not-an-empire looks like it may crumble.
Most of the people who died didn't get an opportunity to complain, so we live with some serious survivorship bias on how bad things got.
It also depends who you are. A very large fraction of American trans people (not a large absolute number, only a few hundred thousand) have moved from R states to D states recently due to repression, such as Kentucky revoking their driving licenses.
I do think the best political-economic era of my life was 1997-2001: election of Tony Blair until 9/11, covering the first internet boom. That was the closest to "world peace". That includes the Israel-Palestine peace process and the reconciliation of the post-Soviet states into Europe. If that had worked better, with a democratic Russia, the world would be a very different place today.
Americans just end up paying for a lot of things that are either undesirable for many Poles (e.g., a huge McMansion in desolate suburbs and the car to drive there) or paid for via other means (e.g., healthcare.)
How do you define "average living standard", so that it would take a colossal disaster to have US reduced to that of Poland?
OTOH, mobility is a privilege, and it's usually the least privileged who are the most affected by war. So I'm not exactly sure how I feel about my own advice, since it's most useful to those that need it least.
We made it a priviledge, but for a biological being, it's the most natural thing to do when you find yourself in a place that is shitty. There is a reason so many risk truly awful things to get a chance (chance!) at a better life: going to where food and safety is, is just what living beings do.
Depending on what you're running for China is in some senses kinda what the US was back in the day, except there's no land so no easy way for them to accept migrants. These day and age migrants also aren't very accepted anywhere.
The difference from the past is that the US has always been a melting pot, while China is pretty much a closed society. If you’d emigrated to the US, you always had a good chance of blending into that diverse society no matter where you came from. Assimilating into the homogeneous Chinese society will take generations.
For me it’ll be either the westernmost end of Europe or one of the better parts of South America, in the hope that they will prosper modestly in the shadows of the upcoming conflicts.
China's migration policies have been extremely strict, so to what extent they will be able to loosen that up without political upheaval is still an open question. So far they've only loosened up the restrictions on internal migration.
I think mismanagement is not accurate. The Soviet system was flawed and inefficient and could not compete. The European empires were made untenable by the world moving on: economic, technological and political changes.
I think Europe and America had a golden age when they were at peace and dominated the world economically from the 80s to this century, and forgot neither of these is a given.
It leads nicely into a conclusion that, even without the preface, seems reasonable: build personal buffers of water, electricity, and cash.
Poland has become a rich country within one generation after the fall of Soviet Union and one of the safest countries in Europe at the moment. There's always gonna be crisis in the world but at the same time you have to admit that we're living in one of the most comfortable times for humanity in general compared to past generations.
If it wasn't for the AI we wouldn't even be having this discussion because the linked vibe coded site wouldn't even be built
Also learn to choose your battle. If you focus on everything that's going wrong in the world and spend all your energy on that, you're gonna have mental problems.
Tribal populations lived isolated lives. Most of human life on Earth involved only small-sized settlements with occasional visitors from the far away places.
Connectedness opens the flood gates . You get inundated with news from every corner as if it is happening in you neighborhood and as if those are your people.
You are not designed for this.
What a bizarre statement. Of course you are not designed for anything. You have adapted, genetically and socially. And you keep doing that. Modern society would collapse if change to a state of the world that you describe would quickly come. If it comes slowly, no matter what change, humans will adapt. Not all of that will be pleasant, but it eventually works out.
That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes. It's like those cities, where all traffic and power supply would be affected for every rain. That's not adaptation. That's just living precariously on greed and assumptions.
The drastic changes, if any, themselves would be purely man-made, not like asteroids that killed dinosaurs. A proper evolution or adaptation would not have drastic changes. Changes would be gradual in synch with the pace of biological evolution.
Why? I, as the poster you replied to, do not see it this way at all. Any society, modern or not, can adapt to slow changes. And rapid changes would be at least as damaging several centuries ago, when for example 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval.
Things can look a lot smoother after a few centuries. My 2c.
Adption is not just genetical. A person can move from northern Europe to southern italy without problem. Its genetics don't need to change for that.
> That means the modern society is not sustainable and cannot adapt to long-term changes.
I don't see that connection. As long as change comes sufficiently slowly, adaptation is no problem. It's mainly that the quicker change comes, the more painful adaptation is. This it unrelated to how sustainable society is.
It's almost s if economic theories actually describe reality! Given that it's economy 101 predicting that this would happen.
Still, people do it again and again. Rent control proponents for housing should take notice.
People bring in Tokyo as an example, but there’s even a rent control-esque thing here - right to refuse. Technically landlord can increase the rent, but you can challenge and refuse it, to keep paying the original amount. Like rent is going up heavily over here (my neighbourhood is about 10% YoY). You can’t really even build up fast enough to accommodate demand.
Without introducing an unpopular tax regime, the French govt has found a way to progressively increase prices for higher mileage motorists. Supplying most motorists at a reasonable price, while having high-mileage motorists pay the unsubsidised price for most of their petrol.
Rent control working depends on multiple other policies and on the characteristics of the place. For Paris for example it did seem to have a positive effect: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05315123v1/file/Morin%20et%20al.%20...
Why does this might not apply to other cases? Paris is very dense already, not a lot of places to build anyhow. What other policies are required? Ensure people do not buy only for investment and leave things empty - they raised the uninhabited tax to discourage that, will see if enough to make a dent.
Almost all measures since have been detrimental to new housing, great for real estate owners, extremely poor for renters and allowed house prices to skyrocket. None of these things are on their own and it's a more-or-less global thing but they've done a great job making it worse.
And as a bonus: this was projected to happen by the governmental planning agency and rejected as fearmongering.
- To maintain fellowship, the empire spreads money to buy influence
- eventually this starts to cost too much, so the empire reduces spending
- wars ensue and independent voices emerge
- unable to establish order, the empire loses its influence and collapses
You can see this patterns as the US is overspending (high debt / trade deficit) while reducing its diplomatic influence on international programs. Not sure how they can save the USD value over time.
Claude chose a weird turn of phrase here. Does this mean "the smallest of the three was the sixth largest"? If the Ukrainians hit a tiny plant, will it now be "three of its hundred biggest diesel plants"?
I do think though it's a little dishonest to be this alarmed now just because the crisis is at your doorstep. There is continuous misery all around the globe which everyone should acknowledge. The wars in the middle east brought destruction for generation and for entire regions. I am not sure those people are worried about the interest rates in Japan as much as they are about surviving. Including the current war. Think about Iran and its government what you will, but when a school gets bombed, innocent children die. I am not sure I find this less concerning than the state of natural gas capacity in Germany. And I live in Germany.
As for the energy crisis, the solution is in front of us. If you don't want to depend on foreign fossil fuels start electrifying and switching to renewables and batteries. You can do it cheap and fast. In fact, this is already happening in parts of the world and they are much more shielded from the current issues than elsewhere.
Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT? The text is clearly written by a polish person that speaks fluent english as a second language - I know cause I am one. Telltale signs are sentences like "Meanwhile, shares are at records" which is an overly direct translation of the polish equivalent, where the word "rekord" by itself implies a record high whereas in english you'd make it explicit.
You tell me:
> Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating
Or:
> France: a run on the pumps. [...] drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. [...] A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.
A cursory check on Pangram returns 100% AI written just from the first 4 paragraphs.
There may have been some human involvement with this website but they certainly didn’t edit it for style. Unfortunately if you don’t edit for style then people will default to the assumption that it’s entirely vibecoded.
- "But the same closure that empties a granary fills somebody’s brokerage account." Claude is obsessed with comparisons linked by "the same". There are several instances, like "Poland made the same swap, with oil" (but that one is odd because "the same" isn't referring to anything).
- "Europe’s potato belt tells the story in a single season": Claude also loves this "noun verbs the noun in a single noun" phrasing.
- "A country that loses its regular supplier does not only pay more. It ends up dealing with people it does not know." Claude's classic "it's not X, it's Y" constructions.
- "Strategists do not describe a stampede home. They describe Japan quietly ceasing to be the buyer everyone could count on, and long-term borrowing costs rising everywhere as a result." A variant following the pattern "it's not X, it's Y, and Z as a result." This is an interesting pattern, one that I don't think I've ever seen a human write. A human would likely write "...leading to rising long-term borrowing costs" or similar.
- The use of a verb (rising) there in the third part is typical Claude, as it really likes to verb when a noun would read better. Other examples: "markets price another rise"; "volume freezes, prices stay put and sellers wait"; "after five years the rate floats".
- "The test Tusk describes is a test of belief, and it arrives just as the Pentagon decides how many Americans stay." The juxtaposition here (a test that arrives) is very odd and typical of Claude.
- What's also generally striking is the proliferation of "X becomes Y" phrasings, which is something Claude loves to do. Price shock turned into empty pumps. A story is told in a single season.
I'll stop there.
What's fascinating to me is that I personally find this kind of text exhausting to read, but apparently other people don't notice it at all.
If we ignore the AI stuff, I will still say this is not good writing. What's so grating and noticeable for me is the monotonous style. The short, clipped sentences like little stabs of information. It never varies; the tempo is just fact, fact, fact. It's absolutely exhausting to read pages and pages of this.
Good non-fiction writing is enjoyable to read for a myriad reasons; authors use metaphor, juxtaposition, tempo, humor, irony, allusion, and all sorts of techniques to make an article enjoyable to read. Just throwing down facts one after another with this kind of breathless, staccato noir voice is not that, in my personal opinion.
I don't know how much AI is to blame, maybe the Polish version is different or if this is a deliberate style.
This technical analysis is really futile and counterproductive, there exists only vicious greed which will be followed by a catastrophe.
The Israel wanted a confrontation with Iran, and used it's --as we now all know-- pit-bull lapdog USA to do most of it for them. They killed Iran's leader and some of his family: something we long ago decided is "not modern".
Both countries are not giving in. And they should not. These are existential matters for them; they crossed red lines; they are illegal escalations by all rules and conventions. But the west can do what it wants.
Now Europe is caught in the middle. US has fuel, and basically annexed Venezuela. Europe has to pay through the nose for energy.
The narrative has never been more blatantly misconstrued in the corporate media: Russia will not attack Europe, and if genocidal-Israel can have illegal A-bombs while refusing inspections why bother with Iran doing the same?
Fearmongering. All to "save our democracies and freedom". It's getting old really quick. And combined with ridiculous immigration policies they may destroy Europe as we know it in a few decades, I'm afraid. But saying so, results in the immediate "extreme right-wing Putin propagandist" label, and thus can be disregarded.
- what action specifically is the west pushing Zelenski away from Minsk?
- why is the Ukraine war a lost cause if it is tying up Russian military resources?
- how does Merkel wish for a stronger Ukraine defense indicate a wish for confrontation instead of a deterrence against it?
- how does northstream, which seems to be Ukraine going against “the west”, an evidence for the west wanting a confrontation with Russia?
- what action specifically is the west pushing Zelenski away from Minsk?
Both Minsk and Istanbul accords would have been signed if the west did not encourage Zelenski not to sign. The BoJo visit is widely quoted.
- why is the Ukraine war a lost cause if it is tying up Russian military resources?
Ukraine itself it lost. Maybe the west-coalition still finds it useful. But the country is now conscripting women. They do not have the men anymore. No airdefence. Losing land at an ever increasing pace. Attack on russian industry are countered with 10x harder attacks on ukrainian industry. Supporting coutries less willing to give to Zelenski. Country is in shambles.
- how does Merkel wish for a stronger Ukraine defense indicate a wish for confrontation instead of a deterrence against it?
If you are a guarantor country for a de-escalation peace deal, it is dirty to merely hold up appearances in order to buy Ukraine time to strengthening them for the confrontation that you know will come. That's two-faces guarantorship.
- how does northstream, which seems to be Ukraine going against “the west”, an evidence for the west wanting a confrontation with Russia?
As long as the NS is operating, Germany and Russia have strong economic ties. Breaking those ties by an act of industrial terrorism (by Ukraine on Germany -- which should trigger a NATO-art5 in normal situations) is bringing NATO more together. Germany has to buy energy from the US now. Lol.
Putin wanted the confrontation and started to attack Ukraine, killing people for no other reason than his ego.
US has expensive fuel and not the right one and also still trades its oil internationally and facing a huge price increase for millions, it also has to pay a lot more money for fertilizers.
The oil of venezuela is the wrong kind of oil and can't just be bought and processed by the USA with a snip of a finger. They have to build/change their refineries for it.
Minsconstrued in the media? Russia will not attack Europe because Putin knows he is gone the moment he starts attacking Nato.
Yeah lets have a PROPER discussion and not some right-wing telegram magic group thinking wanna be intelligence experts. After Ukraine, Moldovoa, Belarus and others would have fallen.
This proxy war is a realltive good outcome especially after what russia was doing the last 15 years: Propaganda manipulation in the west and killing of people with toxins and intervening / playing armsdealer to Africa with conflicts against France.
Russia invaded Ukraine. Yes. In geopolitics these things happen. You need to know eachother's red lines. Ukraine in NATO is such a line. The west also did it: Turkey (NATO) is still in Syria, US topples Venezuela, US attacked Cuba, Israel is currently outside of its border -- all in the name of security. But Russia cannot do it. No Russia is bad and policy is Putins-ego driven.
NATO can attack Russia (though Ukraine) so it's not a direct confrontation and not on NATO soil. "To the last Ukrainian!" the shout. It's really horrific. Ukraine is ravaged by West/NATO policy. And then remember that Zelenski said he wanted to keep the peace and stay neutral during his election campaign.
"This proxy war is a realltive good outcome" -- nearly made me puke. It looks at Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Is you do not want to fight the war, but just pay from the sidelines, you are IMHO an evil manipulator.
There is no ban or ban attempt on speaking Russian in those countries, you can hear spoken Russian on the streets of Riga, Tallinn or Kyiv. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odesa_clashes, nothing to do with Russian ethnicity or language.
One of the attacking groups is the "Right sector", see their OUN links. These guys are basically neo-nazis, and they were killing ethnic Russians. Wikipedia frames this information as Russian propaganda, I see it as what actually happened.
The people that died where Unionists -- you know those groups that got us 8h workdays, weekends, holidays and sick-leave.
Perhaps Ukraine should have agreed to never join NATO, but I'm not sure whether this would have prevented the war. After all, Putin seems to genuinely think Ukrainians are not real ethnicity, and that the land thus belongs to Russia. From a Finnish point of view, Russians have again and again proved they cannot be trusted. Even during the good period between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian air force regularly violated our airspace. Intelligence operatives kept buying property that made no financial sense, but was located near military installations or critical infrastructure. Why would a friendly nation do this?
I believe in negotiations and diplomacy with Russia, but ONLY when all that is backed by enough military force. Because that is what Russians ultimately respect. The Soviet Union annexed or enslaved its weaker neighbors into puppet states, and that is what Russia ultimately aims to do. Ukraine is only the first step.
I'm shocked on how you don't care or mind at all that a whole country is getting attacked at all and you don't care apparently that Putin has killed 500.000 OF ITS OWN people to protect its ethnic russian population?
NATO is not ATTACKIng RUSSIA through UKRAINE. NATO is PROTECTING UKRAINE FROM Russia.
And you either are compeltly clueless or ignorant. Russians main strategy is to overtake a country and the first thing they do is to remove the local people and put russians in their place to break their culture.
Ah wait you are a russian bot or so. Go back to your propaganda telegram group.
It's rein.
It's also nonsense, Russia had Germany on a leash, you cannot seriously believe Merkel was playing Putin.
I've grown skeptical of all those "witch! burn her!" voices, but I'm open to evidence.